Jason Priestley

by Jason Priestley

  About half the guests stayed at the Atlantis, while the other half stayed next door at the One&Only Ocean Club. Several couples brought kids, who could go to their own Kids Club. Between the two resorts there was almost too much for everyone to do. Gambling, clubbing, water parks, swimming, snorkeling, five-star restaurants, Jet Skis, sailing, barbecues on the beach, golf . . . every activity you can imagine in a wonderful paradise. The time literally flew by. The location was perfect.

  The wedding ceremony itself was held late in the afternoon, after the strongest heat of the day had passed, in the gorgeous formal gardens. The reception was held afterward around the pool. A very unspoiled bride, Naomi spent the hours before the wedding doing the bridesmaids’ makeup. She got so involved that she ran out of time to do her own the way she wanted, but of course she looked exquisite nevertheless. She wore a designer dress with our initials, J and N, embroidered in white on the train. No one could even see them; it was a tiny little secret hidden in the dress. She looked like an angel.

  The Royal Bahamian Choir sang, and the official island Police Band played. Naomi had a great idea—as the ceremony ended and we walked back up the aisle as husband and wife, the choir burst into the classic “Oh Happy Day.” It was beautiful, perfect. Being big foodies, Naomi and I both were quite picky about the reception menu, and it more than exceeded our expectations. A huge pile of stone crab claws, literally four feet high, dominated a buffet table. Lobsters, shrimp, and every kind of seafood pulled directly out the nearby Caribbean waters were exquisite. The amount of food was overwhelming and every bite of it delicious.

  Naturally, we flew in our wines from California. Our friends at Behrens & Hitchcock from the Behrens family boutique winery on Spring Mountain in Napa were kind enough to custom-bottle our wine. They rebottled their outstanding 2003 cabernet into double-magnum-sized bottles labeled with our wedding invitation, which was a wonderful treat. We set one out at every table, along with Veuve Clicquot and Moët White Star champagne . . . lots of it! There were loving toasts and funny toasts, and Barenaked Ladies shocked me by singing “Close to You” accompanied only by mandolins. A very cool moment for me.

  A fireworks display, my surprise gift to Naomi, was a big hit. My new wife was truly surprised and moved; her reaction made me really glad that I had arranged the show. Everyone was wowed. It made for a fantastic climax to the night. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, a few days later we headed off to the One&Only Palmilla in Mexico for a weeklong honeymoon with just the two of us. Hey, you only get married once . . . I figured we should do it up right!

  A month later, we were at home, just an old married couple watching some silly reality show where the couple was getting married. The ceremony was at the One&Only Ocean Club, and as the bride and groom turned to walk back down the aisle, the Royal Bahamian Choir burst into “Oh Happy Day.” We couldn’t believe it! Copied already!

  Battery Park City

  New York

  10280

  I’ve been coming to Los Angeles for pilot season since the 1980s, more than twenty-five years ago. It’s like spring training for actors—you’d better get your game on. It’s hard work—constant memorization and then throwing it away and immediately moving on to the next thing. Pilots are shot in March or April. Actors find out if the show gets picked up in May. The show goes into production in July (for dramas) or August (for sitcoms).

  Some years you get a pilot right out of the gate; other years you don’t get one until the end of March. Sometimes you get nothing. That’s the life of an actor, though the older I get, the more I understand the gravity of pilot season and how important it is. I’ve had exceptional luck with pilots; every single one that I’ve shot has been picked up as a show . . . and 90210 ran for ten years. I only made one pilot that didn’t get picked up. It was a show for FX called DOPE, about drug trafficking, and it starred Keith David and me. Naturally, out of all the projects I’ve done, I was most surprised that that one didn’t make it.

  In 2005, I shot a pilot for a show called Love Monkey for CBS. It was picked up and turned into a midseason show being filmed in New York. Six months into our marriage Naomi and I packed up our two dogs—my beloved elderly French bulldog, Swifty, and our Alaskan Malamute, Pris—and drove all the way across country to Manhattan on the southern route, stopping in Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Indianapolis along the way and squeezing in a few visits to friends. It was a four-day road trip, nothing to it.

  We arrived in New York and had to find a place to live. Naomi found an apartment in Battery Park City that we both loved—actually not far at all from our old loft, the scene of many a good time. Love Monkey was a show about the music industry, starring Tom Cavanagh as a guy who started his own indie record label with a bunch of friends who helped him through his trials and tribulations at work and in his personal life. Judy Greer, Larenz Tate, Chris Wiehl, Katherine LaNasa, and I rounded out the regular cast. As much as I liked working on the show, and all my fellow cast mates, I would have liked to have had a bigger role, mainly because I like to work and have never been one to sit around, but at least I had a good time hanging out again in our old stomping grounds during my free time.

  We started shooting in October and shot eight episodes . . . then the network execs canceled the show. Only three episodes ever aired. Too bad . . . it was a fun show, and I thought everybody involved did a great job. I thought that maybe the early shows focused a bit too much on the character’s job in the music industry as opposed to his relationships, and audiences had a hard time becoming invested, but who knows? Believe me, you never really know. But after just a few episodes, when ratings did not deliver, the network pulled the plug. They don’t mess around these days.

  Fortunately, my wife was much more productive. Naomi was doing some very cool stuff. She had a great time in New York that winter, nailing down all kinds of amazing gigs. New York is the center of the fashion world, and Naomi became an in-demand makeup artist that year—for magazine cover shoots and editorials, but the coup de grâce was the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. That winter in New York was worth it just for that.

  After our work in New York, we repacked the car and drove back across country, the northern route this time, visiting Chicago and Mount Rushmore along the way. We also made a quick stop in Sun Valley to visit some friends and ski, and somehow we stayed for two entire weeks. My agents were calling me nonstop, telling me to get home for the rest of pilot season, but the snow was so unbelievable that we kept deciding to stay for just one more day.

  We did eventually return home, and not surprisingly I didn’t get a pilot that year.

  The Beverly Hilton Hotel

  Beverly Hills

  90210

  Even if I’d wanted to, I could never really leave Beverly Hills 90210 behind. It was a cultural phenomenon that continued to live on and on. In 2006, the entire original cast made an appearance at the official “Season One Boxed Set DVD” release party at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. It was a great chance to catch up with everyone—a couple of people had new partners and Tori, naturally, was accompanied by her new significant other.

  When Tori left Charlie, after only a couple of years, for a married Canadian actor named Dean McDermott, it made a big splash in the entertainment news. I was shooting Love Monkey at the time in New York, and my costar mentioned something about it to me.

  “Hey, man, your old buddy Tori hooked up with my old buddy Dean. You’re really going to like him, he’s a great guy,” Tom had told me.

  “Good, glad to hear it,” I said, though I was sorry to hear about Tori’s split. I liked Charlie. Still, fine, it was her life, I wanted Tori to be happy, and I trusted Tom’s judgment. At the event, we were all being pulled in every direction, alone and in various combinations, by the media and the paparazzi most of the evening. Finally, while taking a breather, at some point I found myself inside the Hilton, in a hallway, with Dean standing alone nearby.

  I walked over to him, extended m
y hand, and said, “Hi, Dean, Jason Priestley. Welcome to our big dysfunctional family.”

  He stared down at my hand, then back up at my face. No handshake, no response, nothing. I was somewhat taken aback by this reaction.

  “Well. Tom Cavanagh speaks highly of you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” Dean said aggressively.

  “Yeah. For some reason, he seems to think you’re a nice guy.” I turned and left. Haven’t spoken to him since.

  I had a much more pleasant introduction to Brian Austin Green’s new girlfriend. He was dating a young actress he’d met guest-starring on Kelly Ripa’s sitcom Hope & Faith. Megan Fox was sweet and almost painfully shy. She was a natural beauty with a fresh-faced look—not surprising as she was only in her early twenties. She stood quietly off to the side as Brian was interviewed on the red carpet, fidgeting a bit and playing with her long hair as she waited patiently. None of the paparazzi gave her a second look.

  A year later she would be one of the hottest female movie stars in the world. Once again, you gotta love Hollywood.

  About a month after the DVD event, I happened to be home watching the local news one night, something I rarely got to do. Tori Spelling’s yard sale made the broadcast that night. Apparently, she and Dean were moving now that she was pregnant. Her personal style had changed. She was getting rid of everything. That’s what she told the press. Suddenly, I saw my very own wedding invitation on-screen. Apparently, it had gone for five bucks, including a personal autograph by Tori. She sold my wedding invitation to a stranger for five dollars.

  I turned and looked at my wife, and she at me. We were both stunned. I couldn’t believe how violated I felt. I couldn’t understand how Tori didn’t find that kind of behavior inappropriate. Sure, she got rid of everything she could, apparently, including plenty of personal mementos from her own fairly recent wedding, but that was her own stuff. Her privacy was one thing; mine was another. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how she thought this was okay to do to a friend and coworker of nearly a decade. Naomi and I were both gobsmacked, to use a good English word.

  I was already far from enchanted with Tori’s new husband. This was just icing on the cake.

  The producers of Tori and Dean’s ubiquitous reality show do make a point of asking me to appear on every single iteration. So far I haven’t been able to find the time.

  “Pleasantville”

  USA

  At the beginning of Naomi’s pregnancy that came along in our second year of marriage, we had all these wonderful ideas that we’d be able to live in our 1928 house on a hill with fifty-two steps to the front door once we had kids. We figured, hey, we’ll throw up some gates and the kid will be fine. We had no idea of the realities of strollers and diaper bags and all the stuff a baby would need.

  Naomi was about six months along when I was sitting in the living room, watching the NHL playoffs on TV one day. All of a sudden, the front door swung open and my pregnant wife stood there holding five bags of groceries. Sweat had broken out on her forehead. She did not look pleased. “We’re moving!” she said.

  “Sure, baby, whatever you want to do. You want to move, let’s move. Good idea!” I told her.

  She was in serious nesting mode, all right. During that last trip up all those stairs, carrying bags of groceries—something in her just snapped. She got serious about finding the right place to live. Within a week, she called asking me to meet her to look at the perfect place she had found for us in the Valley. As I got closer and closer to the address, I realized that I was just a few blocks from where Frank Levy had lived when I first arrived in Los Angeles, in his picture-perfect neighborhood. Frank, sadly, had passed on in the 1990s. He was a good guy; it was a sad day for me when he died. After we parted ways, I did not have a manager again for ten years.

  This neighborhood was still truly something special, the ideal small-town USA look and feel, hidden away behind the crossroads of some of the busiest freeways in L.A. In addition to looking like a movie set, it was a friendly and tight-knit community with lots of kids around. We put an offer in that day and bought it that night. Naomi was in no mood to fool around.

  Next we were on to the great name search, which lasted for months. We had all the books full of baby names. We both loved the name Ava but kept discarding it because at the time there was a run on that name. Everywhere we turned, someone else was naming their daughter Ava. One night, a friend of ours was listening to our discussion and said, “Who cares what everyone else is doing? You love the name Ava, she’ll be your Ava, call her what you want.” It was very good advice.

  On the night our daughter was born in 2007, I spent the night in the hospital with both her and my wife. Seeing Ava’s birth was a life-altering experience for me. Until that moment, our daughter had been very theoretical to me. Of course I watched Naomi’s stomach expand and felt our daughter moving around inside, but the baby just wasn’t real to me. The moment I saw baby Ava, everything changed for me in a profound and serious way. The gravity of the situation struck me: this tiny little being was completely dependent on her mother and me for her existence and survival. The weight of that responsibility struck me immediately, and all my loving and protective instincts kicked into high gear. Or to put it more simply: one look at her face and I was a goner.

  Of course, we got very little sleep that night. I awoke early the next morning, said good-bye to my girls, and drove back to the Warner Ranch, where I was shooting my new television series Side Order of Life. I was completely scattered and emotional and for once in my life not well prepared. I had to do a long driving scene where I was in the car talking to someone on the phone. I pasted the dialogue pages all over the inside of the car so I could be “driving” and look casually down and remember what the hell I was supposed to say next.

  My world had shifted on its axis; I would never be the same again.

  Cedars-Sinai

  West Hollywood

  90048

  Naomi spent a couple of days in the hospital recovering, and then I wheeled my wife out to the waiting car. We carefully put Ava in her brand-new car seat for the very first time and I drove home. The three of us! Naomi and I kept looking at each other in shock, like we’d just gotten away with something.

  Of course, outside the hospital, a group of photographers lay in wait, trying to get the first shot of Ava. We did a lot of maneuvering to sneak out of the place without a tabloid photographer chasing us down for the first newborn shot. My agent at the time recommended that we make a deal for an official photo shoot so that we could control the situation, not a tabloid person. It’s an unfortunate reality of the world today that when anybody famous has a baby, it brings out aggressive tabloid photographers, trying to be first, looking for that money shot. Believe me, to them it’s all about money. The main reason celebrities set up official “baby shoots” is to take any profit for aggressive photographers out of the equation. Nobody needs to be surrounded by flashbulbs as they try to take a days-old baby home for the very first time.

  It was strange and wonderful and exciting to unload our tiny little infant and take her inside with us, but we were pretty sure we had it knocked. We’d both read plenty of parenting and baby books, not to mention we’d spent a great deal of time around friends with children. We were a bit overconfident, actually, because we knew nothing about having a newborn. Nothing. I got Naomi settled in bed, Ava resting in a bassinet next to her. Right from the start, Ava had an excellent appetite and breast-fed with no problems. Everything was fine, until she started crying—which she proceeded to do for the next twenty hours straight, no breaks. We had a colicky newborn on our hands.

  As first-time parents, we were completely dumbfounded. We tried everything. Feeding her. Changing her. Picking her up. Burping her. Walking around with her. Putting her in her bassinet. Swaddling her. Nothing worked, and Naomi and I just looked at each other as the hours wore on, becoming more and more frantic. This baby had been an absolute angel in the hospital, with bare
ly a peep out of her the first couple days of her life. Now this tiny little creature would not stop screeching at an earsplitting level. It was shockingly loud.

  I finally found a way to carry Ava around, walking with a very slight bounce that seemed to soothe her; also, she had worn herself out. After her epic crying bout, she finally fell asleep the next morning, a full twenty hours after I had so happily put her and her mom to bed. Naomi and I were completely hollow-eyed, worn-out, and shell-shocked, and quite a bit less sure about our parenting knowledge than we’d been just a day or so before.

  We quickly learned that the problem was Naomi’s diet; she had to stick to very simple food while breast-feeding. Anything with the slightest amount of nuts or soy or dairy caused an immediate and dreadfully negative reaction in Ava. So Naomi lived on plain chicken, rice, and arugula for the next nine months. In less than two weeks, she was back to her prepregnancy weight—the strict diet plus breast-feeding caused any baby weight to disappear in a flash.

  My job was head cook. I made sure that plenty of the extremely limited foods the girls could tolerate were stocked and ready to make at all times. Naomi and I went into full swing with our baby-raising diet, and our team effort really paid off. Ava was happy and healthy. Meanwhile, Naomi’s mum and London friends sent real, truly English Cadbury chocolate for when she could eat it again and she got her stockpile ready. She’d given up everything else without a murmur, but when it came time, she wanted some chocolate, stat!

  We were the absolutely classic new parents, completely spellbound by our baby. We spent hours just watching Ava, waiting to see what she would do next. We could not get enough of her. We snapped photos, shot videos, and took her everywhere—you name it, we did it. It was no surprise that my old friend Jann Wenner made a great offer for Ava’s official baby pictures. He sent a first-class photographer over to our house, who took a stunning family photo of the three of us in the backyard. Then he put it on the cover of US magazine. Baby Ava was already a cover girl!